This invention relates to workflow management.
In a workflow, work itemsxe2x80x94whether physical items such as products and paper documents or virtual items such as communications and electronic documentsxe2x80x94progress through a series of one or more task stations, where each task station has an inbox queue for work items waiting to be serviced as well as resources that service work items retrieved from the inbox queue. As work items progress through the workflow, it is practically inevitable that some work items will make slower progress than others. This is due to the nature of the work items themselves (for example, a status-inquiry call is likely to take a different amount of time to handle than an order call) as well as to the different capabilities of the resources that are servicing the work items (for example, different levels of expertise of call center agents who are handling the calls). This results in some work items progressing through the workflow ahead of schedule while others fall behind schedule.
It is desirable for the workflow to make automatic adjustments to bring each work item to completion on or ahead of its schedule as determined according to a given business strategy. For example, when a workflow is overloaded with work items, one business strategy is to bring all work items to completion a short time behind schedule (i.e., xe2x80x9cshare the painxe2x80x9d), while another business strategy is to maximize the number of on-schedule work items at the sacrifice of significantly delaying a small percentage of work items that have already fallen behind. Various extraneous data can also play a part in the business strategy. For example, in a call center application with known customers, such as account holders, the business strategy may require that tasks for preferred customers be completed on schedule at the expense of regular customers when necessary. Workflow adjustments to achieve such business strategies generally are difficult to implement automatically. Therefore, the prior art has usually adopted the approach of initially assigning work items to different inbox queues based on the adopted business strategy, and then servicing the work items from each queue in a first-in, first-out and/or priority order. Servicing items on this basis does little or nothing to correct the schedules of xe2x80x9cat riskxe2x80x9d work items or to optimize the business results of workflows with different business strategies, however.
This invention is directed to solving these and other problems and disadvantages of the prior art. Generally according to the invention, work items in a queue are repeatedly reordered to maximize results according to a given business strategy that is expressed through target completion times and deviances therefrom. Specifically according to the invention, in a queue that has an ordered plurality of work items that are waiting to be worked and each one of those items has a target completion time, the amount of the target completion time of an item that has already expired (e.g., the amount of the target completion time that the item has already spent in processing and in the queue) and the amount of additional time that is likely to expire before the item is worked (e.g., the position of the item in the queue times the rate of advance of the item between queue positions) is used to determine whether the item either may be retarded or needs to be advanced in the queue, relative to the other items in the queue, in order to meet its target completion time. Preferably, the determination is of the number of queue positions that the item may or needs to be moved, and is computed as the difference between the target completion time and the sum of the above-mentioned expired time and additional likely time, divided by the rate of advance and rounded down. Based on the determination, the items in the queue are then reordered to optimize a metric of items that may fail to meet their target completion times (e.g., those items that need to be advanced in the queue). Illustratively, an optimization function is performed on the queue to determine an order that optimizes the metric (e.g., that minimizes a number of the items that will fail to meet their target completion times or that minimizes the amount of time by which the items will exceed their target completion times), and the items in the queue are reordered accordingly.
The determination and reordering are preferably performed when the item enters the queue or each time that an item changes position in the queue. The order of the enqueued items is thus frequently adjusted to maximize whatever business strategy, expressed through target completion times and deviances therefrom, is being pursued. With the invention, the status of each work item in the inbox queue is uniquely classified, and the needs and consequences of advancing or retarding any given item can be easily evaluated. Particularly advantageous is tying the number of positions that an item can be advanced or retarded to the inqueue rate of advance. This allows the consequences of any reordering of work items to be clearly evaluated. For example, if all that the system knew was that one item was ahead of schedule by xe2x80x9cxxe2x80x9d minutes and another item was behind schedule by xe2x80x9cyxe2x80x9d minutes, the system would not directly know whether swapping positions of the one and the other items would put the other item back on schedule or whether it would cause the one item to now fall behind schedule. But if this information is tied to the in-queue advance time, the system is capable of easily evaluating the requirements and consequences of any reordering. Whether or not any reordering takes place, and the nature of it, depends on the business strategy of the workflow. Another advantage is that different target completion times can be set for individual work items in the same workflow. Work items with aggressive schedules are then automatically advanced through the workflow at a faster rate than other work items. This allows the system to support a substantially-unlimited number of priority levels for each workflow.
The invention encompasses both method and apparatus. While the method comprises the steps of the just-characterized procedure, the apparatus effects the method steps. It preferably includes an effectorxe2x80x94any entity that effects the corresponding step, unlike a meansxe2x80x94for each method step. Further according to the invention, there is provided a computer-readable medium containing software which, when executed in a computer, causes the computer to perform the method steps.
These and other advantages and features of the invention will become more apparent from the following description of an illustrative embodiment of the invention considered together with the drawing.